Whether you're grabbing a quick burger, or splashing out on a lavish sit down meal at restaurant, most diners expect their food to have been prepared in a clean kitchen.

And that's why all businesses are required to display their food hygiene ratings. If you look, most places that serve food to the public have a green sticker in the window, which shows how that business fared in its last inspection.

The ratings are then published by the Food Standards Agency to "help you choose where to eat out or shop for food by telling you how seriously the business takes their food hygiene standards."

And surely that has to be a good thing, right? No one wants to be left with a dodgy belly after eating food they've bought after all.

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Businesses given a zero and one star ratings are demanded to make 'urgent' or 'major' improvements to their hygiene standards - and let's face it, most of us would want to know if we're about to eat something from a place which has 'low standards' when it comes to cleanliness.

Whenever we run a report on a single food hygiene ratings here at Lincolnshire Live, we give the business concerned a telephone call to see if there's anything they want to say about it. (It can sometimes be a bit of an awkward conversation.)

And what's more, the hygiene ratings don't actually tell you how good the food tastes from a premises with one, or zero stars.

So, always up for a challenge, we thought we'd send our Food Monster reviewer out go out and order some food from a business with a zero food hygiene rating to see what it was actually like.

And at random we chose the Sunny Chippy in Bardney.

As the name spells out, its a fish and chip shop, with a sit down dining area inside. It was given a one star rating in August 2017 and was told by the inspector to make improvements to its 'hygiene food handling'.

This means the Food Standards Agency says this business needs to get better at it's 'hygienic handling of food including preparation, cooking, re-heating, cooling and storage'. Crikey.

What's worse, the establishment, which was known as Sunny's Plaice up until about a year ago, was also told to make major improvements in its 'Management of Food Safety'. This definitely sounded disturbing,

But all perusing the Food Standards Agency website tells you about this area of the inspection is that it's to make sure the business has 'systems or checks in place to ensure that food sold or served is safe to eat, evidence that staff know about food safety, and the food safety officer has confidence that standards will be maintained in future'. That could be any number of things, including bad paperwork.

Still, it didn't fill me with a huge amount of confidence as I set out to try to the food at Sunny's on a chilly January night.

I was fearing the worst to be honest and was starting to wonder if my boss had sent me out on a job that would inevitably result in me having to call in sick as a result of a meal I'd eaten the night before.

But, as I've been responsible for some of the reports on food hygiene ratings myself, I felt I sort of owed it to all the businesses with poor hygiene ratings that I've reported on to give the food a go at at least one of their premises. So to the Sunny Chippy it was.

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You might have fond memories of rushing down to your local as a nipper and picking up your family's special weekly treat, and you've probably forgotten some of them had cobwebs in the corner and grease on the floor.

When I sat down inside the small restaurant off Station Road my eyes immediately started to wander round the room to see if there was any evidence of lack of cleanliness. I expected to see some sign of this one-star rating staring me in the face.

But I was pleasantly surprised to discover absolutely nothing. Definitely no huge rodents and in fact, the place was almost spotless. Yes there were a few crumbs on the seat next to me but it would be harsh to get emotional about it.

I've sat in places with much higher food hygiene ratings and found lip marks on my glass or bits of dried food on my fork.

I ordered myself a coke, cod and chips and a buttered roll and was tucking in to all three within 10 minutes. Again, I had a good look at everything looking for a sign of weakness, but I had no complaints.

The food itself was good if unspectacular. I thought £1.95 for a bottle of coke was a bit rich but otherwise I was mostly satisfied.

The chips were fine though nothing particularly special - but the cod was a real treat. I got a healthy portion too. I went for the normal size and I could barely finish it.

Across the room I spied another punter had gone for the XL and I can confirm it really is gigantic and worth an extra two quid if you've got a bigger wallet and an even bigger stomach.

But there was one thing that was a bit poor, my bun... if you can call it that. It was a burger bap, a dried up, rock-hard, burger bap.

Perhaps this wasevidence of Sunny's need to improve the way it stores the food? But while no one wants a slightly stale bread roll, it was hardly the greatest of sins.